Italian · Main
Chicken Piccata
- Easy
- 25 min
- roughly 2 of 4 for cost
Leads with richness that coats and comforts, acid holding everything up to the light, lifted green at the very end.
Ingredients
- 2 chicken breasts, halved and pounded thin
- Flour for dredging
- 3 tbsp butter, 1 tbsp olive oil
- 120ml white wine
- Juice of 1 lemon
- 2 tbsp capers
- Parsley
The skills inside
Deglazing & pan saucesReducing a sauceSearing: the hard crustThe coat before the fry: dredge, crumb, batter
The words inside
Deglaze & FondReverse Sear & the Gray Band
Allergen screen
Found: gluten · dairy · alcohol
Screened for: gluten, dairy, egg, nuts, peanuts, fish, shellfish, molluscs, soy, sesame, celery, mustard, lupin, alcohol. Not screened: sulphites.
Screened by keyword from the ingredient list, not reviewed by a person; check every label for what the list cannot show.
Method
- Season and flour the cutlets; sear 2–3 min per side in oil + 1 tbsp butter; remove. 3 min
- Deglaze with wine, scraping the fond; reduce by half.
- Add lemon juice and capers; swirl in remaining butter off heat.
- Return chicken to coat; shower with parsley.
How it should come out
- Cutlets of even thickness, around 1cm, golden edge to edge on both faces with no pale patches of unbrowned flour.
- Sauce is the brown of lifted fond rather than floury-pale, the pan floor scraped clean, and nothing on the plate tastes of raw flour.
- Sauce is opaque and glossy, coats the back of a spoon and holds together on the plate: no yellow butter ring creeping out at the rim.
- Roughly two tablespoons per cutlet, clinging to the meat rather than pooling: cut at the thickest point the chicken is just opaque with clear juice, and the coating is still on the cutlet rather than shed into the sauce.
- Sharp before rich (lemon and caper brine land first, the butter behind them) and nobody reaches for more lemon at the table.
Where it goes wrong The final butter went in over live heat and the sauce split: a greasy yellow slick with the capers stranded in it, and cutlets sitting in oil instead of wearing a glaze.
At the Table
- The Pour
- Chardonnay (village Burgundy)
- Also Right
- Chianti or Barbera
- From the Taps
- Bière de garde
- Zero-Proof
- Verbena iced tea
Chicken is wine’s most agreeable partner. Match the SAUCE, not the bird: cream to oak, tomato to Sangiovese’s acid, herbs to Loire whites.
Saved on this device and kept across visits: export from My Menu to move them.